The Big Salary Mistake People Make When Joining a Startup

The salary/compensation is just one vector of value that you get from a company that you join, right? Another one that you get is you get the learning, whatever it is that they expose you to. Another one that you get is a network that you build while you're there, right? So there's all these other things that also in kind of an aggregate, and maybe, and I think it's common for people to over-index on the compensation or the kind of current compensation and under-index on other things that, and then there's just the raw emotional value. Do you like being around the people that you're around? Do you enjoy the idea that you're working on? Like, is it, you know, those things matter as it turns out. I have a fun HubSpot story. So when we started on this compensation thing, you know, Brian and I had to pick salaries for ourselves, something more than zero. And so we picked $5,000 a month, right? It's like, okay, well, that's— it's a number. And obviously below market value. We'd been out in the market for a while and had worked in our lives. So when we hired employee number 3, we had to decide what we were gonna pay them. $5,000. Hired employee number 4, $5,000. And so we just built this like, okay, if you're here for the salary, You're here for the wrong reason, right? That that's not why you're going to join this motley crew of folks, and that lasted a while. And then it kind of has this inertia built in where it's like, okay, well, all of us sitting in the room chatting with you that we're trying to get you to join the company are all paying ourselves five thousand dollars a month. Now, what do you think you should be able to get when all of us are making five thousand dollars? Of course, that doesn't last forever, and you have to.

What was the pitch at that time? So it's not like you know no offense to HubSpot, but it's not the sexiest idea. You're not saying we're building the electric car here. You know, like you didn't have that. How did you convince people to do this five thousand dollar you know Lego block?

Yeah. So we cheated a little bit, right? Because of the first 8 people in the company, 7 of them came out of MIT Sloan, the same school that Brian and I went to and we met in class. So it was kind of in-network kind of thing. It's like, okay, well, it's just a bunch of friends that sort of know each other in network or whatever. Let's, let's go do this thing, right? And they were kind of far enough along in their careers that they were not missing meals or anything like that, right? They had just gone to a relatively good business school. And so that was it. It's like, and then the other thing, like, this is not that risky, dude. Like, let's say this doesn't work out and we end up being chumps and the idea is really bad 3, 6 months from now, you'll basically be able to pick up where you left off, right? There's like, there's no loss other than the opportunity cost of those 3 to 6 months. This is not like an irreversible lifetime decision that I've made this call and that's all I'm gonna have to be able to do for the next 5 or 10 years. And that was enough.